Zoo City - By Lauren Beukes Page 0,18

a portable generator up the fire-escape, kerlunking the unwieldy yellow bastard up the stairs one at a time, Sloth wincing at every metallic clang.

"What's that for?" said the giant companionably as he walked up behind me. He was wearing a dark khaki security-company uniform, slightly too small for him, with a name badge featuring the silhouette of a Spartan helmet that read SENTINEL SECURITY and ELIAS. He didn't offer to help, which I appreciated. In theory.

"Work."

"Stealing electricity too good for you?"

"Too potentially electrocutey for me." Most of the

tenants shared illegal hook-ups, jerry-rigged wiring running between flats, sometimes between buildings – flaccid tightropes for a decrepit circus.

"I could organise a sideline for you charging cellphones. Lots of people don't want the hassle of going all the way downstairs to the phone shops."

"And I don't want the hassle of dealing with lots of people. Thanks."

"All right," he said and squeezed past me up the stairs, whistling and swinging his security baton. It took me twenty minutes to heft the generator up on my own.

The third time, he knocked on my door, brazen as that. When I opened it, he was standing there with a hotplate tucked under his arm and the Mongoose slung across his chest, looking sulky.

"I know you don't like lots of people," he said. "How about one?"

"Depends," I said. "What does one want?"

"I have this hotplate."

"I see that."

"And ingredients for dinner." He indicated the grocery bag at his feet. "And nowhere to plug it in." He grinned.

"Stealing electricity too good for you?"

"I'm a terrible thief. But a great cook."

It turned out he wasn't a great cook. But neither was I.

He was surprisingly easy to be around. My shavi is a bitch. Most mashavi are. But I was cynical about people before I could feel the threads of lost things radiating from them, like cracks splaying out from a hole in a windscreen. He didn't have any threads. Lost things, yes, incredibly faint and blurred around him, but no connections. Obviously, he had something horrible in his past, viz the Mongoose, but he wore it well, like a soft old shirt that's been washed many times. It turned out this wasn't a coincidence.

It also turned out that his name wasn't Elias. Elias was just the guy he filled in for when Elias was sick. The rest of the time, Benoît hustled. Odd jobs, man-on-the-sideof-the-road stuff, bouncer, labourer, fixer, entrepreneur, as long as it was legal, or mostly legal. Seducer of women was not part of his résumé, he claimed, until he met me.

In fact, I was the one who kissed him.

"I didn't expect you to be so forward," he said, surprised.

"Better than being backward," I said. The texture of his burns under my palm was like cellophane.

"Must be nice to wear your scars on the outside," I said.

"I'm not the only one," he said, touching the ruin of my left ear where the bullet had caught me. But he only told me about his wife and kids in January, four and a half months after we'd first started sleeping together.

We were perusing the wares on a food stand downstairs, when he dropped the bomb that his wife's mother used to have a fruit stand in Walakase.

"Wife present tense?"

"Possibly. I don't know."

"You failed to mention a wife." I thought I was speaking at an appropriate volume, but I was loud enough to perk up all the hawkers on the corner. Even the upstanding young drug-dealer on the corner with the unnaturally wide-eyed Bushbaby craned his neck to see what was happening. Sloth ducked his head. He hates it when I make a scene. "Maybe you should have told me about your wife, Benoît."

"You didn't ask," Benoît said calmly, picking up a mango from the fruit stand, turning it over in his hands. He squeezed it gently. Ripeness check, aisle three.

"I thought those were the rules we were going with. Former Life out of bounds. No questions."

"Why?"

"Because it's none of my business. I didn't want to know."

"And now you do. And this is my fault?" He swapped the mango for another candidate and handed it over to me, while the fruitseller pretended not to gawp. "What do you think of this one?"

"I think it's soft in the head."

"Would it have mattered to you, if you knew, cherie na ngayi?" I knew the textbook answer. The manual of morality dictates that I should have said "of course" or "how can you even ask that?" but I've never been a dependable liar. Or a